


Without You

by Quilly



Series: The Garden of Fate [6]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M, Friendship is Magic, Gen, Humanstuck, Soulmate AU, what happens after you lose your soulmate
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-11
Updated: 2015-10-11
Packaged: 2018-04-25 20:32:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 575
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4975507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quilly/pseuds/Quilly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sollux's world burst into colors when he met Aradia.</p><p>And when he lost her, the colors remained.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Without You

**Author's Note:**

> soulmate au dump. prompt was "you're colorblind until you meet your soulmate and generally colorblind after you lose them; what does it mean if they die but you can still see color?"

Your name is Sollux Captor and you don’t want to talk.

But here you are, so might as well narrate.

When you were four years old you met your best friend Aradia and the world bloomed for you. Colors burst from your greyscale world and Aradia was the brightest thing in it, grinning up a storm. Even at four you loved her dimples. You loved her. But since you were four you didn’t get what that meant other than you knew Aradia was going to be your best friend forever.

Forever has an expiration date, as it turns out.

You’re thirteen, your knees muddy from the fresh-tilled earth, your vision a blur. Gross sobs heave up from your chest and you cry where no one can see you, kneeling on her grave and spent from trying so hard to hold it in during the ceremony. You didn’t want to cry in front of her family. In front of yours.

You don’t bother wiping your face, your nose. You let it all run down your face in a gooey wet mess.

It occurs to you, as you mop up your face with your sleeve, that something isn’t right.

It’s been niggling at you since you heard about Aradia’s accident. Something is off. What is it that’s…

An orange butterfly flutters past and lands on some of the flowers in the cemetery and you understand.

Why can you still see colors?

The soulmate shindig was supposed to be straightforward: colorblindness before meeting, colorblindness after. You were so caught up in your grief that you didn’t even notice. And now that you do…what are you supposed to make of this? What does it even mean?

You don’t bring it up to anyone. You hate yourself for it, even, because it’s an easy target. How dare you still enjoy seeing the dumb rainbows in the world when Aradia…you still can’t say it.

You don’t know why this is happening. You don’t understand a lot of things.  You’re only thirteen.

The years pass. The violent throbbing in your heart dulls to an ache. When you make jokes, they’re bitter-edged. Some of your friends got sick of dealing with you, then came back with apologies in their faces. You shrugged off their sorries and typed another command into your computer, just to see what it does.

You yelled at Karkat, once. Really yelled. It happened to be the one night he dared to not be his gruff self and try to talk to you about what had happened, two years later on the anniversary when he found you drunk and gibbering, and you yelled at him. Blocked Terezi on Skype. Sent Tavros a vicious text when he asked if you were okay. Outright ignored Feferi, just turned and walked away mid-sentence. It wasn’t a good week.

Feferi sent you a care package in the mail that you got a few days after you’d transitioned from angry teenage drunk to clinically depressed self-loathing teenage screw-up. In the package was a box of tea, a pirated badly-subbed ninja movie, a hand-painted headphone case, and a USB with a mix tape of some of the most godawful music you have ever heard in your life. You cried like a baby over the box and in your emotionally constipated way made it up to all of them.

You don’t understand why you can still see color.

It might not be a bad thing.


End file.
